Your View of You

Hi, this is Dave Kats, for Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Have you ever thought of how you perceive yourself as a therapist? In other words, how good you feel about yourself as a therapist? How good a job you feel that you do? Well, I ran across an article that said that they're certain factors that determine how you feel about yourself as a therapist. Here they are, they were really six of them.

The first one was self-image. If you have a good self-image, you're going to think that you're a good therapist. If you have a bad self-image, you're going to think you're not so good a therapist. So that stands to reason.

The second one that was the size of your practice. If you have a large practice, if you have a successful practice, if you have a waiting list, naturally you think yourself a better therapist than the people that are struggling to get people to come in, and can't keep people under their care.

The third thing they talked about was having extra education. That those therapists that have extra education really feel like they are doing a better job, and they probably are because they have extra education.

The fourth thing that they talked about was specialization. When a therapist specializes in something, then they feel like they're doing a better job. For instance, if you specialize in EMDR, or if you specialize in Gottman, then you might feel like feel do a better job, and you probably do.

The fifth thing they talked about was the size of your practice as far as profitability is concerned. If you're very profitable, you'll think of yourself as a good therapist.

The sixth thing that they talked about was dedication. How dedicated you are to your profession. Very dedicated, you'd think you're a very good therapist.

Now, there are most of those things, you can see that most of those things we can change if we just put our mind to it. I want to talk just about a few of them. Self-image is a big one, we'll talk about that later, but let's talk about the amount of education you have and specialization.

I think that if you want to feel better about yourself as a therapist which will translate into a bigger practice and will translate into a higher income, I think you have to get some extra education. Decide what you really enjoy about therapy, and then delve into that and get some extra education. Maybe it's learning about EMDR, like I said, or learning about the Gottman procedure. Those things or both things, and if you had them under your belt, you would feel better about yourself.

The other thing that I talked about is specialization. I think you should go out and get some special education, I don't care what it's in, whatever you're interested in. Then I think you should specialize in that area and really try to promote that area. For instance, if it's Gottman, you might want to really try to promote your marriage and family counselling that you do. I think you would feel like you'd do a better job which would translate into more patients, patients that will stay with you longer, and a better income for your practice.

This is Dave Kats. Thanks for listening.